study authors, led by Brent McFerran, a marketing professor and social psychologist

I probably know more about obesity than these two "experts" combined.

Quote:

The researchers found that students who were primed with an exercise theory of obesity ate significantly more chocolates than students primed with a diet theory.

Now that's interesting. The effect of "priming" has been studied before in other fields. I don't know much about it, but I understand the fundamental principle. There's even popular jokes about that. It goes like this: Don't think about elephants. What are you thinking about? Elephants. They call it priming in the article, but it could also be called misdirection.

Quote:

"Our results echo a lot of medical research that changing one's diet is a much easier way to shave off calories than going to the gym more often," McFerran said. The study was published this month in the journal Psychological Science.
...
It's also possible that a person's BMI could affect which theory he or she found more plausible. For instance, trying to lose weight by eating less, but not succeeding, could lead someone to put more stock in exercise as the answer to weight loss.

So they went in with an idea, and probably transmitted this idea - through the same principle of priming they were studying - by formulating their questions a certain way. On this forum, there's this constant and continuous fight between the calories hypothesis and the carbs hypothesis. Rather, those are the two main hypotheses in the world at large. This study is based on only the calories hypothesis. Consequently, all their answers will fall in that spectrum of belief. Rather rather, if we ask people if they believe the cause of obesity is either "calories in or calories out", there is no option to answer differently. That's the fallacy of false dichotomy.

The idea of an association between belief and fact is still interesting. But I don't see how this association is translated into cause-and-effect, and then into a practical solution. I mean, if it's so hard to not overeat when doing exercise, then how do lean people still believe that diet is key? "Lean people" implies exercise without overeating, you see. It's more likely that none of these people know what the real cause of obesity is.